Hello and welcome to another edition of Things That Don’t Look Like Spiders But Are Actually Still Spiders.

In today’s episode, we have a regular stick. It must’ve fallen into this spider web by accident. No spiders here though. Any spider definitely would’ve abandoned its web and built a new one if a stick fell into it. If you’re something that eats spiders, there’s absolutely no point checking out this web. Nothing to be seen here – just a plain old stick.

Oh. Wait. Upon closer inspection it’s actually a spider that has collected a bunch of crap and arranged it to look like a stick and then evolved to camouflage against the fake stick that it made. My bad, nature, I definitely should have seen that coming.

These little crap collectors are Trashline Orbweavers. Yep, that’s their real name. It’s both funny and accurate, because they are Orbweavers that make lines of trash in their webs. We laugh, but these little guys are obviously doing something right. There’s 180 different species of them worldwide, and they’re found on every continent except Antarctica.

Side note: Antarctica doesn’t have any spiders, but they do have Giant Antarctic Sea Spiders which aren’t technically spiders but are certainly terrifying and huge.

Anyway, back to Trashline Orbweavers. They actually don’t all make lines of trash, some of them make really pretty spiral designs which are also cool. I’d definitely recommend doing a Google Image search for ‘cyclosa spider webs’ and checking out the creations of these impressive web designers.

Okay, that’s all for today. Tune in for another episode of Things That Don’t Look Like Spiders But Are Actually Still Spiders whenever I find another spider pretending to not be a spider.

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Trashline Orbweaver (Cyclosa sp.), Los Amigos Biological Station, Madre de Dios, Peru 🇵🇪